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May 11, 2008
What could possibly be a better match than Anita Mills' pots made from North Carolina clay and Melissa Miller's paintings of the Eno River, one of the beautiful natural preserves that make up the state's glorious landscape?
Craven Allen's area for exhibitions is on the lower level of the gallery and generally has to fight for air against the closed-in feeling of such space, but not this time. This show dissolves all that in the brilliance of Miller's watery world and Mills' unusual finishing touches on what begins as traditional clay forms.
In her gallery statement Miller writes she has been a painter all her life, but began working in earnest in 1995 after taking classes with local artist Jane Filer. She found her niche in landscapes dotted with abandoned buildings that had a decidedly Southern flavor. Last year, however, the drought and the real fear that we were using up all our water sent her to the Eno with a new sense of urgency.
There, she found a river receding into a rocky, craggy shoreline and felt the same sense of abandonment that she saw in her old structures. Dilapidated buildings mark a passage of time, the same process that seemed to be happening to the river. Even before she realized the Eno was her muse, it had always been a part of her life. Now, with 18 months to go before this exhibition would take place, she set out to paint the river in as many ways as she could, and the 10 paintings represent a discipline to her art and a dedication to the gallery and to the river.
Miller covers her canvases with rich pigments. Those of you who walk the Eno on a regular basis will recognize a particular spot where you have wiggled your toes in the water or sat near a bank, reading a book, or enjoyed a picnic with those you love. It has been a long time since I wandered on the bank, but I was drawn to the "Old Pump Station Trail," because the painting opened up and led me in.
As my eyes were drawn toward the middle ground where the river disappeared, I could feel the crisp day, the stillness and the smooth skin of the rocks which are usually under water. Toward the top of the canvas, the bare trees blur into whitish, blue paint strokes, standing like bleak sentinels on this wintry day.
Miller has translated her feel for this natural wonderland onto the surface of the canvas. Whether we know it or not, we recognize it as a very special place.
Mills takes her pots beyond their utilitarian uses, adding embellishments generally used for printmaking or jewelry design; she is also comfortable in woodworking and carving and here and there slips in a vase that is turned wood rather than baked clay.
She comes to her art through the rigors of academic training; becoming expert in every studio course offered and then adding art history to the mix. She has an MFA in Studio Art and Art History, not an easy combination, from the University of Texas, Austin, and became a one-woman show in her 12 years at Minnesota's St. Cloud State University, teaching design, drawing, painting, printmaking, theory of art and a survey about women artists. According to her gallery notes, she moved to this area in 1989 and is a full-time artist and "itinerant teacher of art/design/craft."
Although she calls herself a potter, Mills' special ability in jewelry making has given some of her pots an added element that makes her work difficult to categorize. For example, "Blue Bowl with Blue Coral Necklace," is a medium size pot, fired with a denim blue glaze that has dripped streaks down the sides of the rounded surface. Not satisfied to smooth the rim and call it finished, she adds a necklace of blue coral spears interspersed with silver beads and hangs it around the neck of the bowl. The necklace rests in the crease at the bowl's top, waiting until its owner is ready to wear it.
Among her other pots is a gray bronze one with four necklaces of bronzed glass beads around its neck. There is also a white bowl with a strand of turquoise, amber, gold and copper beads and a magnificent vessel of turned maple and cherry with a turquoise slab at the top and a necklace of turquoise that has settled as a belt just above its pot-belly base.
On the tops of some of her pots are slabs of clay that look like broken shards, which she decorates by using printmaking techniques. She also pays homage to the ancient art of pottery with her shard-top pots. She shapes them like classical amphoras, adorns them with heavily patterned clay fragments and positions them in their own tripod base.
Mills wrote that she believes there is a place in this world for purely decorative objects and she is thrilled to make objects that are "simply stunning beauties to behold."
We concur and as Keats would say, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
Blue Greenberg's column appears each week in The Arts. She can be reached at blueg@bellsouth.net or by writing her in c/o The Herald-Sun, P.O. Box 2092, Durham, NC 27702. ---
If you're going ...,/i>
"The Eno River: Paintings by Melissa Miller" and "Piecework: Mixed Media Ceramics by Anita Mills," Craven Allen Gallery, 1106½ Broad St., Durham, through July 3. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. For information, call 286-4837.
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